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Monday, November 22, 2010

A new take on the Gold Dragon

I've had my eye on Papo's fairly new "Dragon of the Rising Sun" figure for a while now. I've never really been a fan of AD&D's styling the Gold Dragon after the oriental 龍*. I'd always imagined them as winged dragons, just like the other dragons in the Basic Set. But it would scratch my itch to have a Gold Dragon figure to plop on the table, and would serve double duty for when I run OA campaigns.

But today I noticed that Papo has also now released their two headed dragon model (which I was considering to fill the Black Dragon niche) in gold.

Now, according to the Basic Set, Golds have a 100% chance to speak and cast spells, and a mere 5% chance to be caught napping.

A dragon with two heads would be much less likely to be caught fully asleep. One could rest while the other kept watch.

A dragon with two brains would be more intelligent, one would assume. More likely to speak and be able to use magic.

A Gold dragon has two forms of breath weapon--fire and chlorine gas. One type from each head!

A Gold dragon is lawful, and a two-headed intelligent dragon would need to have both heads operating in harmony to function. Seems like a fairly lawful mindset to me.

The only thing that doesn't fit by the book would be that a Gold only has one bite attack. But then at 6d6 damage, that's fairly nasty just for one bite.

I don't know that I'd actually re-envision Gold Dragons in my campaign to all be two-headed just because I may buy the figure. If I do get the black two-header, I definitely won't be applying this logic to Black Dragons. But it was fun to think about.

[Pimping Michigan Toy Soldier Company in my links, because I've always got great service from these guys.]

*"long" in Pinyin, "lung" in Wade-Giles for those of you who don't read Chinese.